Tag Archives: Bucky Baxter

Rayland Baxter is quickly becoming one of Nashville’s most buzzed-about singer-songwriters. The son of multi-instrumentalist and producer Bucky Baxter (Bob Dylan, Steve Earle), he's now been tagged to open a summer tour for Americana Music Association duo/group of the year and emerging artist nominee The Civil Wars. The tour opens June 24 in Vancouver, British Columbia, with dates announced through July 13 in Dallas (additional dates will soon be announced).

Baxter’s opening sets will feature songs from his forthcoming full-length debut album (release date and title are to be announced), which was co-produced and mixed by Jacquire King (Kings of Leon, Tom Waits), along with songs from his 2010 EP, The Miscalculation of Song.

Watch an acoustic performance of “Willie’s Song,” from the upcoming album, above.

Elmer Lee “Buddy” Charleton, the musician and teacher whose pedal steel guitar work was an integral element in Country Music Hall of Famer Ernest Tubb’s famed Texas Troubadours band, died Tuesday night at his home in Locust Grove, Va. He was 72 and was fighting lung cancer.

From the spring of 1962 until the fall of 1973, Mr. Charleton was a featured Troubadour, playing crucial steel licks on Tubb’s classic honky-tonk material and entertaining listeners with imaginative, complex, at times unclassifiable steel guitar flights during Troubadour band sets when Tubb took a break. Tubb’s band endured numerous lineup changes, and Mr. Charleton and electric guitarist Leon Rhodes were the instrumental focus of what Tubb biographer Ronnie Pugh wrote was Tubb’s “greatest band of Texas Troubadours. … For sheer musical ability they were unsurpassed.”

“Buddy was a quiet man, and yet on the steel guitar he stood out like nobody could,” Rhodes said. “I’ve always been able to play very fast, with the good Lord’s help, but a steel guitar player has a bar in his left hand and some picks on his right hand, and it’s not comfortable for him to go 90 miles an hour playing a tremendously fast song. No matter how fast I could play on my guitar, though, Buddy could do it on the steel. He was incredible, and I loved him dearly.”

“He was one of the all-time greats in terms of tone and attack, and by taking lessons from him you had him as an example to look up to, just three feet away from you,” said Finney, one of the handful of musicians who moved to Nashville and became professional players after studying under Mr. Charleton in the 1970s.Continue reading →

Joe Pug was 13, still going by his given name of Joe Pugliese, and still in North Carolina with his family on the day things changed.

“My dad gave me the first John Prine record,” said Pug, now 26 and the author of a literate, poetic album called Messenger that has wedged him into the national music consciousness. “I’d never heard anything like that before. In a way, it was unfathomable to me that someone could write a song that would be as clear as a well-written book. I mean, I knew exactly what he was saying, immediately.”

Pug didn’t take that information as license to try and write like Prine. But he took it to mean that there are still musical and lyrical angles left to be discovered. With Messenger, he has emerged as a singer-songwriter emboldened by influences Prine, Bob Dylan and John Hiatt, but not particularly weighted by anything he’s heard before.

“Before this tour, I didn’t travel at all with a band,” said Pug, who plays The Basement in Nashville on Wednesday, July 14. “It was just a dude with a guitar, and I’m well aware of how boring that sounds. It’s something I’ve spent every waking moment these last five years thinking about: ‘How can I write songs and go out and play them and make these things interesting?’ I got a master class in that recently, being out on the road opening for Steve Earle. I watched his show probably 100 times: He played solo, and kept the audience in rapt attention for 120 minutes.”

By all indications, Pug is catching on. He’s up for a new and emerging artist trophy at the Americana Music Association’s Americana Honors & Awards show in September, he’s now headlining his own tour with a full band that includes ace Nashville multi-instrumentalist Bucky Baxter and Messenger has been praised to the moon by dozens of publications.Continue reading →

Anthony Edwards of Columbia, Miss. smokes outside Nashville's Municipal Auditorium in February as he waits to be a part of the filming of 'Love Don't Let Me Down' (photo: George Walker IV/The Tennessean).

At the end of a long, powder-blue hallway snaked with electrical cords and stacked with a movie camera, actors and a dozen production assistants, Tim McGraw leaned in a corner of a Nashville movie studio and let out a loud yawn.

It was about 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and McGraw had performed in Lexington, Ky., the night before. He flew in specifically to film a single scene for his new movie, Love Don’t Let Me Down, which also stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Leighton Meester and Garrett Hedlund. After that was done, he would hop on another plane and fly to Michigan for a show that night.

“It’s busy,” McGraw said, his weary eyes showing the strain. Indeed, as soon as his scene was finished, he left the set.

Writer/director Shana Feste (one of Variety’s “10 directors to watch” in 2009) and veteran producer Jenno Topping (the Charlie’s Angels movies, 28 Days, The Brady Bunch Movie) wanted McGraw in their movie badly enough that they were willing to film it in Nashville. (To help secure his participation, the location had to be within an easy driving distance of his home to accommodate his touring schedule and family obligations.)

Of course, the team didn’t choose to film in Nashville just to make McGraw’s life easier. Filming here helped ensure authenticity in regard to music, musicians and locations. Plus, according to Topping, the state’s film and television incentive program was just too good to pass up.Continue reading →